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    Are Prisons Obsolete?
    Are Prisons Obsolete?
    Are Prisons Obsolete?
    Ebook138 pages1 hour

    Are Prisons Obsolete?

    By Angela Y. Davis

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    With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly,the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable.
    In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for "decarceration", and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSeven Stories Press
    Release dateJan 4, 2011
    ISBN9781609801045
    Author

    Angela Y. Davis

    Angela Y. Davis is a political activist, scholar, author, and speaker. She is an outspoken advocate for the oppressed and exploited, writing on Black liberation, prison abolition, the intersections of race, gender, and class, and international solidarity with Palestine. She is the author of several books, including Women, Race, and Class and Are Prisons Obsolete? She is the subject of the acclaimed documentary Free Angela and All Political Prisoners and is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Davis is the recipient of the 2020 Cultural Freedom Prize from Lannan Foundation.

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    Reviews for Are Prisons Obsolete?

    4/5

    156 ratings14 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Really well written book by Angela Davis, it's fairly short, lays out all the arguments in a great way, and is highly educational. It explains the prison-industrial complex from top to bottom, from it's beginnings (a system to oppress freed slaves) to it's place in modern society (a system to oppress poor people and minorities, while being extremely profitable).

      Her goal is ultimately a system that focuses on healing and support, rather than oppression and isolation.
    • 5/5
      This was the suggested read for March for #LansingReads22, and since I had so loved Freedom is a Constant Struggle, I decided to actually go with the suggested title for once and ordered it. (Then got sidetracked for no good reason and didn't finish it it time to take part in the discussion anyway.)

      Davis is brilliant, of course and this is a concise examination of the problem with prisons -- historically and how that got us to now. This seems like it would be an excellent jumping off point for someone new to reading/thinking about abolition. She asks tough questions, but this is just the start of a long and difficult conversation. (An excellent one, at that.)
    • 4/5
      An important essay? Treatise? Great viewpoint, good ideas, hard to put into action.
    • 4/5
      (4.5)

      Read for class and I’m glad I did because I learned so many important things from it that I probably wouldn’t have if I never read it. It’s also terrifying that the sentiments Davis shares are as relevant today as they were the day she originally wrote it. Maybe even more relevant today.
    • 2/5
      Interesting subject although if would required to completely change today’s society as we know it.
    • 5/5
      I read a few chapters of this in college, but decided to take my time and read through the entire book. I read and reread because abolition is something I think we could see in my lifetime. This book is a must read if you are thinking about the concepts of "crime" and "justice".
    • 4/5
      gives an overview of the development of the prison industrial complex in the US and calls for people to envision a post-prison future
    • 4/5
      Despite being 17 years old, still a very good introduction to the concept of prision abolition that makes me want to read more.
    • 4/5
      Extremely good on the history of prisons and how ill-suited they are for their purpose. Not quite as strong on potential alternatives, requiring some pretty radical (and long overdue) changes to society in general over a sustained period of time but these details are skated over in comparison to the rest of the work. Too short a book for a complete solution, a good primer on the fundamental flaws in prisons.
    • 4/5
      This short book raises all the right questions. Definitely a good book for a first foray into the concept of prison abolition. The concept of the Prison-Industrial Complex, while not new to me, is fleshed out nicely here. For what it is, it does a great job, but leaves a lot to be desired in imagining abolitionist alternatives (as in the final chapter, which is a short 9 pages).

      Overall, I would recommend this book to everybody. In fact, I'm lending it to my grandma right now. Oh and if anybody has any recommendations for next reads in prison abolition, hit me up.
    • 4/5
      Best for: Those looking for a quick introduction to prison abolition.

      In a nutshell: Scholar Angela Y. Davis provides, through six dense chapters, an overview of the problem with prison as the default response to crime, and urges us to consider alternatives.

      Line that sticks with me: “A description of supermaxes in a 1997 Human Rights Watch report sounds chillingly like Dicken’s description of Eastern State Penitentiary. What is different, however, is that all references to individual rehabilitation have disappeared.”

      Why I chose it: I’m still trying to learn more about prison abolition.

      Review: This is a relatively short book at 115 pages, but Dr. Davis packs so much information into it. She provides a good background of how we got to this point in the U.S., where we have 5% of the world’s population but 25% of the worlds prisoners. She addresses the evolution from slavery to chain gangs (a concept that will be familiar to those of you who’ve watched “13th”), and looks at the way prison impacts people of color more than white people.

      The book also delves into the prison-industrial complex, and how so much of our economy is tied up in the idea of incarceration. From private prisons that rely on keeping people incarcerated to make money, to the government-run institutions that make large purchases from multi-national corporations, prisons make bank on the backs of those most without power.

      The final chapter brings into focus the theme that runs throughout: that we need to think about prison in a different way. Why do we assume that prison is necessary? Because we’ve grown up with it. It’s ingrained in our culture. But it isn’t helping the people in our society, so we need to radically change how we think about it. As in other books on prison, this section still leaves me with questions, but I’m getting there.
    • 4/5
      In this brilliant, thoroughly researched book, Angela Davis swings a wrecking ball into the racist and sexist underpinnings of the American prison system. Her arguments are well wrought and restrained, leveling an unflinching critique of how and why more than 2 million Americans are presently behind bars, and the corporations who profit from their suffering. Davis explores the biases that criminalize communities of color, politically disenfranchising huge chunks of minority voters in the process. Uncompromising in her vision, Davis calls not merely for prison reform, but for nothing short of 'new terrains of justice.' Another invaluable work in the Open Media Series by one of America's last truly fearless public intellectuals
    • 3/5
      Slim, readable critique of the prison-industrial complex. Points out ample racism and sexism, although, oddly, the titular question of "obsolescence" is mostly left unaddressed. Useful as an introduction to the prison abolition movement, although newcomers to the topic may want more convincing that punishment and/or reformation would function better in a post-prison world.
    • 4/5
      highly recommended; a great overview of the "correctional" corporation in the U.S.

    Book preview

    Are Prisons Obsolete? - Angela Y. Davis

    1

    Introduction—Prison Reform or Prison Abolition?

    In most parts of the world, it is taken for granted that whoever is convicted of a serious crime will be sent to prison. In some countries—including the United States—where capital punishment has not yet been abolished, a small but significant number of people are sentenced to death for what are considered especially grave crimes. Many people are familiar with the campaign to abolish the death penalty. In fact, it has already been abolished in most countries. Even the staunchest advocates of capital punishment acknowledge the fact that the death penalty faces serious challenges. Few people find life without the death penalty difficult to imagine.

    On the other hand, the prison is considered an inevitable and permanent feature of our social lives. Most people are quite surprised to hear that the prison abolition movement also has a long history—one that dates back to the historical appearance of the prison as the main form of punishment. In fact, the most natural reaction is to assume that prison activists—even those who consciously refer to themselves as antiprison activists—are simply trying to ameliorate prison conditions or perhaps to reform the prison in more fundamental ways. In most circles prison abolition is simply unthinkable and implausible. Prison abolitionists are dismissed as utopians and idealists whose ideas are at best unrealistic and impracticable, and, at worst, mystifying and foolish. This is a measure of how difficult it is to envision a social order that does not rely on the threat of sequestering people in dreadful places designed to separate them from their communities and families. The prison is considered so natural that it is extremely hard to imagine life without it.

    It is my hope that this book will encourage readers to question their own assumptions about the prison. Many people have already reached the conclusion that the death penalty is an outmoded form of punishment that violates basic principles of human rights. It is time, I believe, to encourage similar conversations about the prison. During my own career as an antiprison activist I have seen the population of U.S. prisons increase with such rapidity that many people in black, Latino, and Native American communities now have a far greater chance of going to prison than of getting a decent education. When many young people decide to join the military service in order to avoid the inevitability of a stint in prison, it should cause us to wonder whether we should not try to introduce better alternatives.

    The question of whether the prison has become an obsolete institution has become especially urgent in light of the fact that more than two million people (out of a world total of nine million) now inhabit U.S. prisons, jails, youth facilities, and immigrant detention centers. Are we willing to relegate ever larger numbers of people from racially oppressed communities to an isolated existence marked by authoritarian regimes, violence, disease, and technologies of seclusion that produce severe mental instability? According to a recent study, there may be twice as many people suffering from mental illness who are in jails and prisons than there are in all psychiatric hospitals in the United States combined.¹

    When I first became involved in antiprison activism during the late 1960s, I was astounded to learn that there were then close to two hundred thousand people in prison. Had anyone told me that in three decades ten times as many people would be locked away in cages, I would have been absolutely incredulous. I imagine that I would have responded something like this: As racist and undemocratic as this country may be [remember, during that period, the demands of the Civil Rights movement had not yet been consolidated], I do not believe that the U.S. government will be able to lock up so many people without producing powerful public resistance. No, this will never happen, not unless this country plunges into fascism. That might have been my reaction thirty years ago. The reality is that we were called upon to inaugurate the twenty-first century by accepting the fact that two million people—a group larger than the population of many countries—are living their lives in places like Sing Sing, Leavenworth, San Quentin, and Alderson Federal Reformatory for Women. The gravity of these numbers becomes even more apparent when we consider that the U.S. population in general is less than five percent of the world’s total, whereas more than twenty percent of the world’s combined prison population can be claimed by the United States. In Elliott Currie’s words, [t]he prison has become a looming presence in our society to an extent unparalleled in our history or that of any other industrial democracy. Short of major wars, mass incarceration has been the most thoroughly implemented government social program of our time.²

    In thinking about the possible obsolescence of the prison, we should ask how it is that so many people could end up in prison without major debates regarding the efficacy of incarceration. When the drive to produce more prisons and incarcerate ever larger numbers of people occurred in the 1980s during what is known as the Reagan era, politicians argued that tough on crime stances—including certain imprisonment and longer sentences—would keep communities free of crime. However, the practice of mass incarceration during that period had little or no effect on official crime rates. In fact, the most obvious pattern was that larger prison populations led not to safer communities, but, rather, to even larger prison populations. Each new prison spawned yet another new prison. And as the U.S. prison system expanded, so did corporate involvement in construction, provision of goods and services, and use of prison labor. Because of the extent to which prison building and operation began to attract vast amounts of capital—from the construction industry to food and health care provision—in a way that recalled the emergence of the military industrial complex, we began to refer to a prison industrial complex.³

    Consider the case of California, whose landscape has been thoroughly prisonized over the last twenty years. The first state prison in California was San Quentin, which opened in 1852.⁴ Folsom, another well-known institution, opened in 1880. Between 1880 and 1933, when a facility for women was opened in Tehachapi, there was not a single new prison constructed. In 1952, the California Institution for Women opened and Tehachapi became a new prison for men. In all, between 1852 and 1955, nine prisons were constructed in California. Between 1962 and 1965, two camps were established, along with the California Rehabilitation Center. Not a single prison opened during the second half of the sixties, nor during the entire decade of the 1970s.

    However, a massive project of prison construction was initiated during the 1980s—that is, during the years of the Reagan presidency. Nine prisons, including the Northern California Facility for Women, were opened between 1984 and 1989. Recall that it had taken more than a hundred years to build the first nine California prisons. In less than a single decade, the number of California prisons doubled. And during the 1990s, twelve new prisons were opened, including two more for women. In 1995 the Valley State Prison for Women was opened. According to its mission statement, it provides 1,980 women’s beds for California’s overcrowded prison system. However, in 2002, there were 3,570 prisoners⁵ and the other two women’s prisons were equally overcrowded.

    There are now thirty-three prisons, thirty-eight camps, sixteen community correctional facilities, and five tiny prisoner mother facilities in California. In 2002 there were 157,979 people incarcerated in these institutions, including approximately twenty thousand people whom the state holds for immigration violations. The racial composition of this prison population is revealing. Latinos, who are now in the majority, account for 35.2 percent; African-Americans 30 percent; and white prisoners 29.2 percent.⁶ There are now more women in prison in the state of California than there were in the entire country in the early 1970s. In fact, California can claim the largest women’s prison in the world, Valley State Prison for Women, with its more than thirty-five hundred inhabitants. Located in the same town as Valley State and literally across the street is the second-largest women’s prison in the world—Central California Women’s Facility—whose population in 2002 also hovered around thirty-five hundred.⁷

    If you look at a map of California depicting the location of the thirty-three state prisons, you will see that the only area that is not heavily populated by prisons is the area north of Sacramento. Still, there are two prisons in the town of Susanville, and Pelican Bay, one of the state’s notorious super-maximum security prisons, is near the Oregon border. California artist Sandow Birk was inspired by the colonizing of the landscape by prisons to produce a series of thirty-three landscape paintings of these institutions and their surroundings. They are collected in his book Incarcerated: Visions of California in the Twenty-first Century.⁸

    I present this brief narrative of the prisonization of the California landscape in order to allow readers to grasp how easy it was to produce a massive system of incarceration with the implicit consent of the public. Why were people so quick to assume that locking away an increasingly large proportion of the U.S. population would help those who live in the free world feel safer and more secure? This question can be formulated in more general terms. Why do prisons tend to make people think that their own rights and liberties are more

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